5 Answers
5

In German it is quite easy to make overlong sentences by using subordinate clauses (Schachtelsätze), like in the example you gave. A "German sentence style" is hard to define. There are no general style rules on how to make a content more easily legible in German. My personal rules of thumbs are

to take care to build short sentences by using as few commas as possible.

I would characterize your passage as "more German than German," that is, even more convoluted than most German originals, which is a mark of a foreigner.

Specifically, it has some 24 words and five clauses by my count. Most "long" German sentences on this site (by native speakers) have 1-2 fewer clauses, and 5-10 fewer words. They are also often broken up by colons and semicolons, rather than commas.

This is kind of a mechanistic tracking mechanism, but my "first pass" is to try to more nearly approximate true German sentences in length and structure. A deeper study would involve learning numerous actual German constructs, thereby getting a better "feel" for what is and is not typically German.

The participle construction often avoids a lot of subordinate clauses (again look to English or famous Ablativus Absolutus in Latin). I use it in English on and on. Probably as I’m biased by a lot participles during my Latin years.

This is a possible construction, but I wouldn't recommend it in this case. Why? In "die nach deiner Meinung auf dieser Liste fehlenden Personen" there are seven words between "die" and "Personen", which is too much in my opinion for easy understanding.
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Hendrik VogtAug 18 '11 at 13:45

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@hendrik But again, its VERY common in English. I dont know why its so less used in German. There is not a real reason. A native english guy might have more problems understanding a lot of Schachtelsätze (like here) while he is pretty used to participle contstructions and deriving the correct meaning by looking onto the context (like Ablativus Absolutus). If too much words for you, leave nach deiner Meinung off, its redundant too because of the imperative Nenne mir
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HauserAug 18 '11 at 13:58

Without nach deiner Meinung I find it quite good. The only negative point is that in your version it is implicitly assumed that some names are missing in the list, whereas in the original it starts with "Wenn".
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Hendrik VogtAug 18 '11 at 14:03

@hendrik correct, thx. I think its clear by context. But you could use möglichen fehlenden Kunden imo. I will add this
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HauserAug 18 '11 at 14:19